That Other Hemingway

Hemingway on his image: Bunny Wilson’s whole theory that I started out to publicize myself as a hunter and fisherman by pictures, etc., is truly false. Max Perkins was always after me for pictures. I was always hunting and fishing ever since I can remember, and the only times we took pictures were then. You don’t take pictures looking at Mantegna, Piero del Ia Francesca, Giotto, learning Spanish, French, navigation, English, aerodynamics or inside the Prado, the Luxemburg, the Jeu de Paume or the Louvre. You wouldn’t tolerate anybody interrupting your working, taking pictures, but inevitably when you win events, set records, etc., or have a fine trophy someone takes pictures. Hemingway to Cowley: 115Hemingway’s reply [to Cowley]is swift. His sympathy is immediate for Melville. Melville, for Hemingway, knew something that those around him and later the scholars (he returns in this letter to the buzzard image for the critics and adds the hyena for good mea­sure) did not. The key word is “knew.” Cowley’s implied compli­ment in the comparison did not stop Hemingway from establish­ing his own criteria. In one sense Hemingway’s reply is a restate­ment of the “iceberg” theory of Death in the Afternoon, but here he is more precise about what it means. Beneath the surface of his short novel lies a foundation of knowledge, Hemingway insisted, that neither Scott nor Faulkner could manage and which consti­tutes that seven-eighths that lies beneath the surface. It is not sufficient that a certain part of the plot stick up above the surface, leaving the reader free to imagine a fund of possibilities and prob­abilities beneath. What is fundamental for Hemingway is that what is beneath the surface is a foundation of information and knowledge which informs every word he chooses to expose. Hemingway’s theory was best stated by Henry James in his famous dialogue with Walter Besant. Considering the plight of the young novelist, James struck a balance between experience and knowledge: “The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it ­this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”52 For James and for Hemingway, invention is not simply a matter of personal experience recollected in tranquility or passion. It is what emerges when a person tries to be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” A novel must have a “truth of detail” that rises above all other characteristics. That is, in fact, “the supreme virtue of the novel” and the singular “merit on which all [the novel’s] other merits helplessly and submissively depend.” This process whereby knowledge informs experience is at the heart of James’s essay and labels precisely what Cowley and Hem­ingway were writing to each other about. Knowing, therefore, was an obsession with Hemingway. Hemingway on Hemingway: ….. in the first war all I did mostly was hear guys talk; especially in hospital and convalescing. Their experiences get to be more vivid than your own. You invent from your own and from all of theirs. The country you know, also the weather. Then you have a map 1/50,000 for the whole front or sector; 115 000 if you can get one for close. Then you invent from other people’s experience and knowledge and what you know yourself. Then some son of a bitch will come along and prove you were not at that particular fight. Fine. Dr. Tolstoi was at Sevastopol. But not at Borodino. He wasn’t in business in those days. But he could invent from knowledge we all were at some damned Sevastopol. Hemingway to Berenson: Hemingway’s exclamation to Berenson positioned him somewhere between the almost religious confidence that he could “make a scene” as well as any painter and the unsettling knowledge that critics and biographers had not noticed the parallel. “Christ, I wish I could paint”3 was not an idle crumb tossed to Bernard Berenson, the world authority on Italian Renaissance art, but a passionate plea that someone would understand what he was trying to do. At times the humor­ous, tender, and affectionate tone that Hemingway used to address the aging Berenson suggests that Hemingway may have found the father he never had. At this stage in his life, biographers had bothered him unmercifully, and he was more aware than ever that they didn’t have the slightest clue about the relationship between his art and his life. Perhaps the art critic would under­stand, or, at least, serve as a surrogate “father confessor.” “Biographies at 53 are shit,” Hemingway wrote to Berenson in 1953. “They [the biographers] don’t know. You are too proud to tell them. And they could not understand…” Berenson on Hemingway: 143Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is an idyll of the sea as sea, as un-Byronic and un-Melvillian as Homer himself and communicated in a prose as calm and compelling as Homer’s verse. No real artist symbolizes or allegorizes-and Hemingway is a real artist—but every real work of art exhales symbols and allegories. So does this short but not small masterpiece. Bernard Berenson.